


Whose margin fades

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Gen, That's it, basically this is a fanfiction about herc and stacker going to ikea, does ikea sell curtains, from ikea, in the future all dogs allowed in all ikeas, literally curtains, with max, yes I checked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:36:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Request was: Stacker/Herc, curtain fic. Result is: Stacker & Herc & Max and a little insult to Tennyson, plus curtains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whose margin fades

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goshemily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/gifts).



“So this is, what. What is this?” Herc said, looking critically at Stacker’s new Hong Kong office. “Where you go when you’re called in to see the headmaster?”

The room was small, according to the legal fiction of a reasonable room. That meant large for the Shatterdome. In the back it was mostly window, and since they were too high up for the cheap water-fed poles, that window had never once in living memory been cleaned. There was a substantial layer of salt and soot and grit between them and the sunset.

Stacker Pentecost did not glare at him, but he held Herc’s eyes for a long moment and did not look impressed.

“This is my office,” he said. “And my bedroom. I lack only a desk, and a bed. A desk chair. A pillow. Extension cord there,” he pointed. Prosaically: “A plant.”

“Curtains,” said Herc, flicking his eyes at the expanse of the blurred window glass.

“Shall we start sewing?” said Stacker, standing with his arms crossed to the side of the room, plotting where his desk would go.

“Shopping, more like.” said Herc. “I’d slap you together a desk if we found one.”

“Shopping. We can take out one of the Jeeps.”

—-

In his son’s mind, everything but piloting was a joke. A way to pass time, equivalent to wasting it.

Picking out curtains was something that Chuck might, when it came down to it, be as much as physically incapable of doing.

His father was only minutely more versatile. There was something so quintessentially surreal about furniture shopping at the end of the world that he wondered if he would trigger the apocalypse.  He wrote out his number and stuck a sticky note on the outside door of his office, set the vibrate to stun, and kept his mobile in his hand.  

He pictured them going out like this. The pair of them driving to Ikea, the dog in the back, on their way to get curtains.

It was so unlikely that he figured the world would keep while they ran this one errand.

They had a couple more things to do.

“We should write this off,” he said, tugging the passenger side door of the Jeep shut. Neither of them had a license to drive in Hong Kong, but there was a limit to the number of laws they could, as men of action and principle, follow on a given day.

“I’ve never once had one of those go through,” said Stacker, behind the wheel. “Time is finite. And I’m going to be looking at the damned things.”

They’d tried to get Max to sit calmly in the back seats, but he kept breaking through to the front of the car, so in the end they’d stuffed him in the boot.

Herc could hear him panting wetly with anticipation as Stacker fired up the Jeep.

“I can tell,” said Herc, “that you’re thinking of a good toile.”

“You know me well,” said Stacker, laconic.

“We’ve drifted together, mate. Pegged you for a toile man inside of ten seconds.”

Stacker peeled the Jeep out of the lot, and Herc gripped the dashboard as he bit down on the end of his sentence. Behind them, Max snorted in surprise and thumped against the wall of the back seats.

“Seatbelt,” said Stacker. The small muscles under his eyes, used equally for frank stares and for refusing to take shit, had lifted. As he sped out onto the frontage road at the back of the Shatterdone, a smile had been fully set in motion. He took an aggressive course of jibing and tacking in and out of the traffic as they came up on it.

By the time car horns were fading out behind them, he was grinning.

Herc popped his window down an inch or so, and caught a salty smack of wind dead in the face. He rolled it back up and thought that Max was missing out.

He checked himself, looking at Stacker’s speed-induced grin.

“Take a look at the pair of us,” he said, laughing at himself before he’d finished speaking.

“Three of us,” Stacker motioned with an eyebrow toward Max.

“The three of us. Like the pride of youth this is, speeding off to buy curtains and damn the torpedoes.”

“I have never purchased a curtain before. A precocious lad, was Herc Hansen,” Stacker observed.

They had been young and had been saving the world for a round minute. Ferociously talented, so suited for the moment, so generous, and then a day later Herc’s arm hair was coming in gray.

After so many years, his thought at the outset of the drift and right before he fell asleep was never about the past, but something exhausted and forward-looking, like,  _almost done_. He was thinking it as they sped away from the Shatterdome.

The landscape normalized as they left the frontage road, but Stacker did not make an attempt to drive like a human being. They pulled up in the Shatin Ikea car park after something like a fifteen minute journey.

 Herc wrestled the disoriented Max out of the Jeep and clipped him on his leash. Max walked in a half circle and collided with Stacker’s leg before he found a straight line.

“I’m thinking the plan is to start at the top, work our way down to checkout,” said Stacker. “Good?”

  
“Just so we don’t forget the curtains.”

Once they were through the doors, Stacker grabbed a cart and immediately piled six extension cords inside. Herc curled up some slack in Max’s leash and followed along.

Stacker picked out a mattress, a bedframe, three more extension cords, and stopped short in front of a sturdy metal desk.

“You think you’d be up to this?” he asked Herc.

“That’s just an issue of owning tools and knowing how to read.”

“So –”

“So yes, Jesus, I can put your desk together.”

—-

It was not quite dark by the time they returned, and the world hadn’t ended.

That being so, they unloaded the Jeep to one of the older freight elevators, and caught Drs. Geiszler and Gottleib sharing a terse smoke break close to the elevator doors.

“Smoking ban’s enforced here,” Herc said to them, hefting Max onto the ground and clipping his leash on.

Newt rolled his eyes, and then he squinted at the boxes as Herc popped the trunk. “Ikea. You bought like, an entire Ikea? Are we turning the Shatterdome into a dorm? Actually, shit, I should have asked you to pick up extension cords.”

“We did,” Stacker said, and started unpacking the car.

“Lend a hand, gents?” Herc had one hand occupied trying to keep Max from eating the illegal litter of cigarette butts K-science had accumulated over the life of the Shatterdome.

Geiszler dug around for the extension cords. “Wow, are these curtains?”

“Fine for smoking is $5,000,” said Stacker. 

“Did you bring me curtains?”

“I’m kind of not worried? 21 days to pay those fines, and it’s good odds the world will end before then? So … curtains. For me?”

“You shouldn’t use words like ‘odds’ if you don’t understand them,” Gottlieb growled, rushing his cigarette like a man who had learned to take his pleasures where he could the hard way, which was by setting off a fire alarm in the lab.

“I understand the _word_ , Hermann, I’m sorry you can’t grasp the idea of understanding something without being a huge asshole about it?”

The elevator doors shut in front of them and Max whined when he realized the cigarette butts were gone.

Gottlieb turned to Stacker. “It’s actually much more likely that the world _won’t_ end, especially inside 21 days.”

On their way out of the elevator they ran into Chuck, who was on his way down the hall looking at something on his phone that made him smirk. In the drift, Herc had unwillingly discovered Chuck’s Reddit username and password.

“Hey,” said Herc. “You have free time to put some furniture together?”

Chuck looked at the four of them in the elevator and knelt down to scratch Max’s ears, ignoring him.

“Chuck,” Herc’s voice turned.

“Sorry,” Chuck said, his voice insincere. He gave Max a fake punch that made him charge back, wheezing happily. “I’m just really busy. Have a blast, though.”

“Fine,” said Herc.

At some point, he raised his son, though he couldn’t identify anything he had  _done_ , in particular, so bewildered that he wouldn’t be giving his kid a leg up into a better life, so absolutely appalled that  _this was it, this was the dystopian future._ Chuck grew up in this Mad Max-type world where a full eleven percent of the population was employed building enormous walls to keep the aliens out.

This had caused Herc to drop the ball on parenting.

There had always been flickers of potential in Chuck, when Herc wasn’t trying to wrestle him for control and teach him and guide him and construct elaborate everyday parables of consistency and forgiveness and why you should hold the door open. That dog loved him, which was worth a lot in Herc’s book. Maybe not anyone else’s.

You only get one shot at making your kid into a human being, and Herc had, what? He’d been doing something else.

When they’d unloaded the boxes in Stacker’s new office, Herc swung by his own room for a tool chest, and came back to find some instructions, and a packet of screws, spread out on the floor. Stacker was staring at then and drinking whisky with water.

“Drink?” He asked Herc.

“I’m operating the machinery here.”

Stacker picked up one of the instruction sheets. “A wrench,” he said, and decisively poured another.

“Last time I make a desk in my life, and I’m drinking on the job,” Herc muttered.

“You heard the scientists. World is more likely to keep going than end,” Stacker said, ripping open one of the packets of screws. “I’m taking those odds.”

Herc counted out the screws. It was the second time Stacker had said something like that. The first time, it had been muttered at him in the middle of a tough love sort of embrace. Stacker had one hand on the back of Herc’s neck and the other between their bodies, maybe to fend him off, telling him that nothing could bring his wife back, and the PPDC didn’t need one of its own rangers joining the class action suit.

You think that you stop making friends after thirty, but really that’s all it takes.

“We’ll find out,” he said.

“I don’t know about you,” said Stacker. “But I plan to at least test this chair. Let me be clear. I’m not saying our situation isn’t dire.”

“This optimism is worrisome, mate,” said Herc.

Stacker held up a hand, indicating that he hadn’t finished talking: “I am not saying our situation isn’t dire. I am saying I don’t trust you to make this chair.”

“Should have got the Skruvsta,” Herc grumbled, and threw a wrench at Stacker.

“I would trust you even less with a Skruvsta. Let me get you a light,” said Stacker, dodging without any visible effort or surprise. The recessed lights along the room’s complete walls had compensated for the waning sun, but the overhead light lit the floor like a flood light. 

Herc had to ask for the wrench back, and he got to work on the desk. 

Stacker fitted a curtain rod in the window. 


End file.
